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The social media is definitely here to stay. More and more people are accepting social media as part of their lives. Facebook, flickr, twitter, myspace, multiply, blog, etc.
Looks like it’s a good idea to create brand awareness around the social media. The companies always thought of eyeball impressions, hence they should be thinking of a suitable social media strategy.
On the other hand, almost none of the companies have any experience working with the social media. They’ll usually call for tenders from the various web agencies.
I don’t really like the idea of outsourcing to agency to maintain it. That’s because it’s very costly, and we can be really too dependant on them.
There’s advantage of outsourcing because we can enjoy the kind of brand awareness that we wanted from public. Thus, creating possible sales leads.
Being pressured by the social media is also through their competitors. They could be seeing their competitors enjoying so much exposure that they need to do something about it too.
As a company representative, what do you think?
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Negative feedback is one of the most fearful thing that every business is facing. They try to shun away from these kinds of things as much as they can so that they will not have any association with them! However, it is inevitable to do that online, especially when your customers have the same level of “broadcasting” effect to tell the world how good or bad your products and services are!
I don’t know if you have heard about this before. For everything that is good, it is just that good. But for bad things to come, you can potentially get far more better things that you can expect! But that is only if you know how! Let’s start exploring how we can make use of bad reviews!
Improve your products and services
It felt really terrible when we know that our products are so lousy and yet we have to think of ways to sell them. However, it is even worse when we don’t know our products’ weaknesses!
Having so many channels of Internet voices telling you about your product (i.e. YouTube, Twitter, FaceBook groups, Google groups, and much more!), you have more than sufficient information to gather from your audience about how good or bad your products really are!
Take this chance and improve them one by one…
(I can still remember the first version of Microsoft Windows is so buggy! But over the years, they have improved their versions to Windows XP and it’s stable! Let’s not talk about Vista here…)
Build a brand that has personal touch to your customers!
It felt really good when we know that our online voices are being heard by the companies and they took the initiatives to make a better product! Customers are the ones who are facing your products every time they need to. They know what is best for themselves. They will tell you what they want… But that’s only if you wish to listen…
Take this chance and listen to the customers’ ”music”!
Communicate with the customers
A brand that listens to the customers. That is almost unheard of. All these while (without Internet presence), we can only see/hear one direction of communication… And that is from the Brand to the Customers. However, in today’s Internet, we can see that it is now possible to have a mutual communication between Brand and Customers!
Just face it! Negative feedback is a norm. Believe it or not, everything on earth has its good and bad… We really must embrace the negative feedback and produce positive results! Business is all about being a problem solver! Or else, our customers can solve the problem themselves without us!
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It’s becoming clearer that anyone who is creating an Internet brand can start by creating a group in the social networks. They don’t have to own a domain in order to start a brand online. It can be extremely profitable and you can build networks out of it for your company.
But how far can you trust your brand with a social network website?
It’s true that we don’t have to buy a domain name to build our Internet brand now. We can simply start a twitter account, create interested group in Facebook, blog at blogspot, and sell at Amazon or Ebay. Your brand can almost be instant this way. However, there is a problem here.
The Problem
What if one of the social media has to close down its business? What will happen to your subscribers? They can be gone instantly with the business closure. That will mean that your business will affected tremendously! That’s what happen to the closure of Yahoo 360. It is so sudden, it’s too abrupt for our business if we were to do anything over there!
There is a debate at Performancing that we should have self-hosted content in today’s Web 2.0 world. This is true even though Mashable questions us if Social Media making corporate websites irrelevant. Both have their valikd point about participating in the social media as well as hosting our own contents in our own domain. So what should we do now?
The Solution
Yes, we should continue participating in the rising social media. And we should maintain the main stream of contents in our own hosted website. Having our own website is very important because of brand ownership. We will have the ability to tell the world where we are (in our own domain) while creating brand awareness in the social media.
On the Internet, you have to play the Internet game. That’s the rule. People will love to be associated with you because of a sense of belonging. They are eager to participate.
Not that you are going to disseminate your power across the social networks, but to bring back that power to your website. What do you think?
Image credit: chrisbrown330
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It can be embarrassing if you are not doing what you have preeched to the Internet world. Be it a personal branding or company branding, people will start t talking about you for not being that same kind of person outside.
Case Study of Twitter
In the recent post from ReadWriteWeb, Twitter employees are not twittering as often even though they are in this twitter industry. It reveals that 49 employees have an average of about 100 to 150 messages each. And they are not following some of the top developers that we thought they should be.
In such cases like Twitter, I don’t believe they will have enough Twitter experience to handle the situation. The twitter is becoming more and more important in our everday life with so many people exploring different usage. Its co-founder also wanted everybody to use Twitter like “electricity usage”, it is hard to believe how it will become when its internal staff are not doing what they hve preached.
Be and do in your personal branding
Whether you are doing your own one-man business or you are branding yourself for a better job prospects, it is crucial for you to tell people what you are doing and always be that kind of person wherever you are.
It is kind of easy for people who are branding themselves. That’s because they already have such an enthusiasm within themselves.
Be and do in the company you are employed in
As part of the company, there is a certain brand that the company portrays to the world. It is embarrassing to say that you are not doing what you are working for. But it is also understandable as you are only employed for who you are to bring value to the company.
For example, I can still remember a mobile phone salesperson who works in a certain brand, but she owns another brand’s mobile phone. No matter how good she was saying, when we asked her why she is not owning one herself, she just whispers to her colleagues and walk away! That is so irresponsible but she really cannot explain too much for her situation.
However, in the immediate case on the web such as Twitter, it is better if you have that kind of equivalent experience as your customers so as to relate your own Twitter experience.
Employees who are on the customer frontline should have a certain form of enthusiasm for their companies. And if you have a website, they will see the whole company as a benchmark!
Images Credit: Churchwolf
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There are a lot of fake brands out there, trying to emulate how the real brands are doing. Some of them have been really successful that the real thing starts to pick up lawsuits to get back their “losses”.
There was an attack of Fake Starbucks. Over there, you can see similar logos, “tarbucks” name with the missing “S” and they are selling “real” Starbucks items inside.
This is what I called “Brand piracy”. They have leveraged on the success of the real brands, and misled the customers into taking the alternative brands. They have adopted the same look and feel, sometimes even better than the real thing!
Fake website brands
On the Internet, there are also a lot of similar attack of websites. When a website seems to be doing well, you will see its competitors trying to emulate the same look and feel of the successful website. A very good example of a successful website is Apple where I get to see its competitor(s) trying to “copy” that same look and feel. And in the Internet marketing world, I have seen some people who actually copied the whole website and created an exactly the same website with a different domain! Then, these fake websites will create a buzz through advertising means such as Google Adwords. An d when it works, it provides instant fortune to them!
Passion can’t be faked!
On a side note, there is one thing which people can never emulate. That is the passion of building the web contents! If you have built a website where there is consistently new contents, it is almost difficult to create the same writing style as the orginal writer unless you have the same passion!
Piracy has been around for many years!
Whether it is right or wrong to create fake brands, this thing will never end! It has gone through so much variations such as pirated goods (For example, shoes, clothes, software, music, videos and almost anything).
In one way or another, they are alive by themselves in the black market. They are also helping to create brand awareness to the rest of the world who can’t afford to buy them, and yet have their means to get cheap fake stuff.
Fake doesn’t mean cheap!
Many of us could have associated fake brands as cheap products and services to buy from. However, they may not come cheap and yet they leveraged on the real brands’ marketing strategy to make themselves as famous too.
Some signs of expensive fake brands:
1) Slightly altered brand names and logos
2) They are as big as the real brands where they open up real shops with the same look and feel
3) Exact replica! Creating confusion for the customers who didn’t know they are not with the real brand!
Conclusion
I would advise not to copy wholesale from a website which you think is very successful. You may want to learn from its successful model. It can be embarrassing when you get into commotion with the real website owners who found out about this issue. It is only short term success before you need to find out how to change according to the fast-moving web trends. (Yes, you can just shut down the website when that happens. It wouldn’t be nice to your personal branding in the same industry…)
Photo credit: Caveman 92223
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